Introduction to special issue on being outdoors: challenging and celebrating diverse outdoor leisure embodiments and experiences

Abstract

The inception to this special issue started long before the three guest editors ever met and certainly long before the call for papers was made. Mandi, as the instigator of the special issue, traces it to musings during the days writing her PhD. She could see that dominant discourses about how to ‘be’ in the outdoors were fairly limited and limiting. Outdoor recreation and education scholars were seeing this and calling for change (Allison and Pomeroy 2000; Gray 2018; Humberstone and Pedersen 2001; Warren et al. 2014). While these academic provocations were raising questions in her, it was something her aunt, a Native Canadian of the Nlaka’pumax nation, said that helped her think in new ways and question views that she had often assumed were universal. Her aunt’s conceptualization of land and possession was so different to the one Mandi had in her head, at the time. Mandi’s aunt understood people as belonging to the land. Thus, she identified Mandi as belonging to the Six Nations due to her birth and childhood being in that place. When Mandi protested that she did not belong to the Six Nations, her Aunt pointed out that it was the land she was born on so it was the land she belonged to. Rather than the land being a possession of Mandi’s, she was a (beloved) possession of that land. They were and are ‘her’ trees and rocks. Not to own but the ones that brought her comfort and familiarity and which, each time that she returns, give her a sense of home, peace and rejuvenation. Much like the relationship of a child to a parent or grandparent, Mandi was blissfully unaware of what her land provided her with at first but as she matured in her relationship with it, she recognized the need to exert care for it and the legacy it creates for the generations to come (Straker 2020). The land she belongs to deserves and requires her stewardship. This is a way of thinking that is deeply engrained in indigenous discourses around being, land and leisure (Henhawk 2018; Mowatt 2018; Wheaton et al. 2020). It has marked a profound and transformational shift away from discourses of outdoor recreation focused on mastery, quest, conquering and possession that are often propelled by popular and academic publications that see outdoor experiences as something solely for the outcome or accomplishment, a western and hegemonic masculine dominated construct (Zink and Kane 2015). Within this context, being committed to the ethics and theory of poststructuralism does not in itself make you see, hear or reflect on blind spots or discourses that are